Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/108

VIII. CEITICAL NOTICES. Nevroses et Idees Fixes. Travaux du laboratoire de Psychologic de la Clinique a la Salpctriere. Vol. I. (Premiere serie), Dr. PIERRE JANET (pp. 492, avec 68 figures dans le texte) ; Vol. II. (Deuxieme serie), Prof. F. EAYMOND et Dr. PIEKBE JANET (pp. 560, avec 97 figures dans le texte). Paris : Felix Alcan, 1898. THESE two large volumes, forming a psychological repertory of some 1000 pages, constitute a work of the first importance. For they not only contain a vast amount of minute, criticised, psycho- logical observations henceforward available to other investigators and critics ; they also show in ever more and more detail the application of a fruitful method. In his former work (L'Automa- tisine Psychologique, reviewed by the late Prof. Groom Eobertson in MIND, vol. xv., p. 120), Dr. Janet worked out with much cir- cumstance the conception of a systematised subeonsciousness, which may result, in various degrees, temporarily or permanently, from disaggregation, or dissociation, of ordinary consciousness. In these ten years of persistent psychical research and experi- ment, the notions of dissociation, subconscious " personality," and the interpretations based upon them, have become very familiar ; so familiar, perhaps, as to be dangerously easy of application to ill - understood mental variations. Dr. Janet, however, like Binet and others, had founded his inferences not on the necessities of speculative psychology searching for co- herent logical interpretations, but on the multifarious experiments offered, made possible and made reproducible in the hysterical subjects of la Salpetriere and other institutions. The central idea of disaggregation of consciousness, or as I should prefer to say, disaggregation of idea-systems, was run through a multitude of diverse conditions, aboulia, amnesia, aniEsthesia of many varieties, automatic writing, spiritism, and the whole train of phenomena subsummed under the term " psychological automa- tism ". Now the facts of each case, the interpretations put upon the facts, and the detailed application of the experimental methods involved are matters for concrete, detailed discussion on the evidence ; but what impresses me as the point of primary im- portance, in the present work as in the earlier, is the elaboration of a method subtle enough to match the subtlety of the facts. Doubtless, in many detailed studies of dreams, hallucinations,